From the cuscus with the fancy coat, to the wallaby often sporting a single white glove, a wide variety of life evolved on island homes in the south-west Pacific.
Model of a thylacine at the Australian Museum.
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It’s not as well-known as the Hills Hoist clothesline, but here’s another Aussie invention worth celebrating: Glide poles are reconnecting severed landscapes for a special group of marsupials.
Mammals have evolved flight more often than birds. By studying the genes of the sugar glider, biologists have found a ‘molecular toolkit’ for flight membranes that’s been in us all along.
Relative of Chunia pledgei named Ektopodon serratus (top left), with Wakaleo oldfieldi.
Reconstruction of the early Miocene Kutjumarpu faunal assemblage by Peter Schouten
Julien Louys, Griffith University; Gilbert Price, The University of Queensland; Mathieu Duval, Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), and Robin Beck, University of Salford
80,000 years ago, Australia’s landscape was dominated by much larger versions of today’s marsupials – including enigmatic and enormous wombats.
The 1878, the body of Sergeant Michael Kennedy lay in the bush in Victoria’s Wombat Ranges. He’d been shot by the notorious Ned Kelly gang – but the bush would add its own gruesome ending.
Two newly discovered species of quokka-sized kangaroos, which lived 18 million years ago in the Queensland rainforest, show evolution in the act of giving kangaroos a taste for leaves.
The numbat is one of the Tasmanian tiger’s closest surviving relatives. And its newly sequenced genome raises the possibility of piecing together the genetic code of its extinct fellow marsupial.
When a plant is stressed, it mobilises its resources and often converts its starch reserves back to sugar. As soon as this happens, the stressed plant becomes sweeter than its healthier neighbours.